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Home , 1997 in home video, Buddy Adler, Deborah Kerr, Delbert Mann, Featurette, Feature film

The Making of : Televising and Visualizing Global in Promotional

by DANIEL STEINHART

Abstract: Before making-of documentaries became a regular part of home- special features, 1960s promotional featurettes brought the public a behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood’s production process. Based on historical evidence, this article explores the changes in Hollywood promotions when studios broadcasted these featurettes on to theatrical films and contracted out promotional campaigns to boutique agencies. The making-of form matured in the 1960s as featurettes helped solidify some enduring conventions about the portrayal of filmmaking. Ultimately, featurettes serve as important paratexts for understanding how Hollywood’s global production was promoted during a time of transition.

aking-of documentaries have long made Hollywood’s flm production pro- cess visible to the public. Before becoming a staple of DVD and Blu-ray spe- M cial features, early forms of making-ofs gave audiences a view of the inner workings of Hollywood flmmaking and movie companies. Shortly after its formation, -Fox produced in 1936 a flmed studio tour that exhibited the company’s diferent departments on the studio lot, a key feature of Hollywood’s detailed division of labor. Even as studio-tour short subjects became less common because of the restructuring of studio operations after the 1948 antitrust Paramount Case, long-form trailers still conveyed behind-the-scenes information. In a for The Ten Commandments (1956), director Cecil B. DeMille speaks from a library set and discusses the importance of foreign location shooting, recounting how he shot the flm in the actual Egyptian locales where Moses once walked (see Figure 1). While the studio tour promotes a revitalized company brand and the trailer adver- tises a motion picture, such behind-the-scenes shorts also manufacture a vision of flmmaking that reveals the changing dynamics of the flm industry in the . These practices coalesced in the 1960s in the form of what Hol- lywood called “promotional featurettes,” which captured the production of a single feature flm usually in fve to ten minutes and played to a wide audience before

Daniel Steinhart is assistant professor of cinema studies at the of . His Runaway Holly- : Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting is forthcoming from the University

of California Press. Press © 2018 by the University of Texas

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the source flm’s theat- rical release. Typically shown on television, fea- turettes helped institute many of the conventions of today’s making-of documentaries. The growth of pro- motional featurettes in the 1960s took place during a time of indus- trial uncertainty for the Figure 1. Cecil B. DeMille uses a map to illustrate his location unit’s trek through in a long-form trailer for The Ten Commandments major Hollywood stu- (Paramount, 1956). dios when the flm busi- ness was volatile. Hits like Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) and The Sound of Music (, 1965) ofered fnancial promise, but these successes were undercut by costly fops such as Cleopatra ( Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964). In an attempt to bring some stability to the flm busi- ness, conglomerates such as Gulf + , Transamerica, and Kinney took over the major studios. These conglomerates diversifed their risk by injecting money from their other into the ailing studios while selling of studio back lots and reducing the number of releases. Still, little seemed to help the studios. Even as Hollywood at- tempted to tap into a vibrant and youthful counterculture at the end of the decade, the industry sufered a major slump from the late 1960s to the early , with few hits and many failures.1 Alongside these transformations, the postwar image of flm production continued to evolve from a movie colony based in into a moviemaking that extended beyond the geographical and symbolic space of Hollywood into regions around the world. Promotional featurettes in the 1960s played a critical role in promulgating this image to the public. Promoting international productions and a more global industry, however, was certainly not new. Starting in the late , Hollywood had used overseas “runaway” productions to navigate many of the changes that befell the industry.2 In the course of this expansion abroad, Hollywood studios created a global flmmaking enterprise that produced motion pictures more international in scope. By the 1960s, when the flm was an erratic afair, promotional featurettes provided a new means to render the drama of flmmaking and the spectacle of global production, thus helping to sell Hollywood movies. Even as the rate of production abroad fuctuated through the 1960s, featurettes sustained Hollywood’s global image

1 Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 2 Thomas Guback, The International Industry: Western Europe and America since 1945 (Bloomington: University Press, 1969); Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (: Press, 2007); Robert R. Shandley, Runaway Romances: Hollywood’s Postwar Tour of Europe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).

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by promoting international pictures that had big ad budgets.3 In shaping this image of 1960s Hollywood, featurettes brought the making-of form to maturity by reinforcing several thematic conventions that persist in today’s behind-the-scenes flms. Thanks to the wide availability of making-of documentaries on home video and the , a growing body of literature has been examining the form. These analyses have revealed various aspects of contemporary media production and consumption: the culture of lesbian feature flmmaking, the role of making-ofs on DVD special editions, the “public disclosures” of media practitioners, and the public’s attraction to peeking behind the scenes.4 These studies show that an ancillary like making-of documentaries can communicate a lot about how the production of media has been marketed to audiences within the past couple of decades. However, historical treatments of making-ofs remain scant. We still know little about the history of the form, how flm industries mobilized behind-the-scenes material in the past, and how making-ofs represented production work over time. This article explores that history by synthesizing archival production records, trade press coverage, interviews with veteran movie marketers, and analyses of promo flms. It shows that promotional featurettes functioned as critical paratexts that visualized production work to add value to flms and the industry as a whole. The concept of the paratext is central to understanding how featurettes helped the Hollywood flm industry promote itself. Scholars such as the late Lisa Kernan and Jonathan Gray adopted this term from Gérard Genette to characterize supplementary promotional materials that stand as key texts in their own right.5 For Kernan, movie trailers operate as paratexts by making meaning for the advertised flm while at the same time being peripheral to that flm.6 For Gray, items such as posters and video games are paratexts that go beyond the duties of marketing and proft generation to create textuality that builds a wider experience for audiences.7 on the work of Kernan and Gray, I argue that Hollywood promotional featurettes are paratexts that not only formulate meaning for the flm they are marketing but also give the industry a way to narrativize the production operation for public consumption. Through this process of textuality, 1960s Hollywood studios used featurettes to emphasize the global dimensions of flmmaking during a period of ongoing production and falling audience numbers. Featurettes of this era demonstrate how promotional

3 “Record H’wood Prod’n Abroad,” Daily Variety, April 14, 1960, 1, 4; “H’wood Hits Alltime Prod’n Low,” Daily Variety, December 10, 1962, 1, 4; and Peter Bart, “Increased Hollywood Production Leading to Shortage in Facilities,” New York Times, July 10, 1965, 15. 4 Kelly Hankin, “Lesbian ‘Making-of’ Documentaries and the Production of Lesbian Sex,” Velvet Light Trap 53 (Spring 2004): 26–39; Craig Hight, “Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions,” Velvet Light Trap 56 (Fall 2005): 4–17; John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Nicola Jean Evans, “Undoing the Magic? DVD Extras and the Pleasure behind the Scenes,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24, no. 4 (August 2010): 587–600. 5 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: The Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6 Lisa Kernan, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). 7 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

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practices and visualizing flmmaking can work together to construct a marketable image of Hollywood production. To understand this portrait of flmmaking in the 1960s, the following historical inquiry analyzes both the promotional and documentary impulses of featurettes. I begin by looking at how the proliferation of promotional featurettes in the 1960s emerged out of a series of changes that the Hollywood flm industry experienced in the postwar era. The practice of movie promotions altered as Hollywood studios moved from relying on in-house publicity and advertising departments to contracting out marketing work to boutique ad agencies.8 These new players in what Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson call the “promotional screen industries” were adept at producing promotional featurettes to help sell a flm in advance of its theatrical run.9 Featurettes also marked a vital phase in the intensifying convergence of flm and television, as TV became a primary site for advertising theatrical flms and illustrating production work. With more moviegoers staying at home to watch TV for their , the broadcast of featurettes refected a wider postwar trend of moving away from promotional campaigns that aimed for mass appeal toward campaigns that targeted specifc audiences in more focused ways.10 For flm studios and contracted ad agencies, the spread of featurettes ofered a way to add value to theatrical flms during the postwar industrial fux. By televising and narrativizing flm production work, Hollywood also found a way to make its own production operations as compelling and mythologized as the movies themselves.

Promoting Production Work. The emergence of promotional featurettes in the 1960s hinged on shifts in flm promotions and coincided with the rise of a new group of movie marketers during the postwar era. For decades during the classic studio era, Hollywood publicity and advertising departments had built up motion pictures through stars, , new , and prevailing notions of realism and spec- tacle.11 By the , when studios produced fewer flms and the movie business was more uncertain, calling attention to the and execution of productions was a way to inform viewers about how flms were made. Developments taking place in the wider advertising business, which, unlike the flm industry, experienced growth in the 1950s, afected the way this was done. Thanks to postwar boom times and higher ad budgets, advertising agencies could aford to sell products in new, innova- tive ways. In creative departments and about the advertising business, agen- cies advanced a subtler way of selling products. Firms moved away from what were

8 As Tino Balio explains: “Promotion was a catchall term for advertising, publicity, and exploitation. The term ‘marketing’ later replaced it, as the industry began to experiment with audience research.” I similarly invoke promotion and marketing broadly. Balio, : The Company That Changed the (Madison: University of Press, 1987), 199. 9 Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson, Promotional Screen Industries (New York: Routledge, 2015). 10 Janet Staiger, “Announcing Wares, Winning Patrons, Voicing Ideals: Thinking about the History and Theory of Film Advertising,” Cinema Journal 29, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 17–19. 11 Janet Staiger, “The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1985), 97–102.

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deemed “hard-sell” strategies that appealed directly to why the should buy the product. Instead, agencies put forward “soft-sell” tactics that indirectly brought awareness to the features of a product and the reputability of a brand name.12 These competing selling styles had existed in earlier eras, but they took on a renewed relevance in the 1950s and 1960s, when a strong , new research on consumer motivation, and the persuasive power of TV advertising encouraged agencies to em- brace soft-sell techniques.13 In his memoir on the “golden age of advertising,” the commercial producer Robert Naud recollects that “with hard times behind the nation, advertisers changed their approach from hard sell to soft sell, using humor, less than beautiful people, and clever fresh ads American viewers talked about.”14 The debate over soft sell versus hard sell afected how Hollywood sold movies in the late 1950s. While flm companies had been selling movies through indirect means such as star publicity and product tie-ins since the 1910s, postwar soft-selling featured more nuanced methods that could help spread interest in a flm by word of mouth.15 Rather than pushing slogans such as “The greatest motion picture ever made!” in trailers and print advertisements, studios gave audiences behind-the-scenes insights into the flmmaking process.16 This soft-sell style was especially useful with the strengthening power of the “pre-sell,” a strategy to bring notice to a flm before its release so that studios could increase the chances of recouping their on the theatrical frst-run of a big-budget picture.17 At a time when the fnancial success of a single flm could make up a sizable portion of a studio’s annual earnings, preselling a movie was critical to helping each flm appear distinct to the public. The movie critic Jay E. Gordon articulated this need in the early 1950s, declaring, “Each motion picture should be sold as a separate article of , advertised in accordance with its own merits and within the bounds of established rules of salesmanship pertinent to creations of art.”18 By the 1960s, preselling a flm became a standard routine.19 The practice of preselling changed which aspects of a movie a flm company promoted. A promotional campaign was launched during the preproduction and shooting phases rather than just before a flm’s theatrical release.20 The production experience then became subject matter for a campaign. Publicizing production had a long tradition in Hollywood, dating back to the 1910s, when flm companies had

12 Arthur Bellaire, TV Advertising: A Handbook of Modern Practice (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 180; and Gene F. Seehafer and Jack W. Laemmar, Successful Television and Radio Advertising (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 182–183. 13 Juliann Sivulka, , Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), 55, 266–273. 14 Robert Naud, Lights, Camera, Madison Avenue: The Golden Age of Advertising (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 2. 15 Staiger, “Announcing Wares,” 10–12. 16 “Soft-Selling Pix as ‘Quality’ an Industry Must: Goldwyn Jr.,” Daily Variety, May 1, 1958, 7. 17 “Early Pre-Sell Need Greater Than Ever to Get Pix Coin; UI’s Lipton,” Daily Variety, April 22, 1958, 1, 5. 18 Jay E. Gordon, “There’s Really No Business Like ,” Hollywood Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Winter 1951), reprinted in Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945–1957, ed. Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 289. 19 Balio, United Artists, 198. 20 “Agency Plumping for Ad-Bally Prior to ’ Shooting,” Daily Variety, May 14, 1958, 4.

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advertised the high budgets and large scale of prestige productions.21 In the postwar era, when movie audience numbers were decreasing, marketers highlighted flmmaking procedures in promotional materials to prove a flm’s worth and the ingenuity of the cinematic medium.22 With promotional featurettes, flm companies found a form that could efectively foreground these attractions. Because the producers of featurettes were on flm sets to chronicle production work, the story of how a movie was made became the focal point. The then flled an intermediary stage in the promotional campaign, between when a production wrapped and when trailers played in movie theaters and advertisements appeared in newspapers. For flm companies, the logic behind promotional featurettes was that when potential audience members saw ads for a movie upon its release, they would “remember having had a ringside seat at its making,” as producer insisted.23 Postwar internal rearrangements in publicity and advertising departments also brought about the reworking of movie promotions. Studios trimmed their in-house promotional operations in the early 1950s to cut overhead as a result of antitrust measures and the initial competition from television. These studios instead subcontracted some of this work to outside advertising frms. By the late 1950s, all the major studios, except for Warner Bros., had an exclusive deal with National Screen Services to create trailers.24 In the following decade, studios contracted out some of their advertising work and trailer production to New York advertising agencies, which had departments specializing in radio and TV commercials. The consumer ad agency Young & Rubicam did business with Paramount to devise innovative campaigns for flms such as Rosemary’s Baby (, 1968), employing iconic posters and ofbeat trailers.25 20th Century-Fox and United Artists signed deals with the entertainment agency Diener/Hauser/Greenthal, and MGM looked to William H. Schneider Inc.26 By and large, studios depended on a variety of sources to mount promotional campaigns. The larger established agencies delivered print ads and placement, while the smaller, freelance creative shops generated media spots, including making-of featurettes. All these adjustments occurred as Hollywood studios were injecting more money into campaigns mounted by outside agencies and downsizing their own publicity and advertising departments to cut overhead. Mike Shapiro, the director of the promotional flm division at MGM during the 1960s, recalls trying to convince studio executives to invest more money in movie marketing because of the short time frame of a flm’s theatrical run. “You had a four-week window where a movie was determined

21 Staiger, “Hollywood Mode of Production,” 99–100. 22 Daniel Steinhart, “‘Paris . . . as You’ve Never Seen It Before!!!’: The U.S. Marketing of Hollywood Foreign Pro- ductions in the Postwar Era,” InMedia: The French Journal of Media and Media Representations in the English- Speaking World 3 (2013), http://inmedia.revues.org/633. 23 Philip K. Scheuer, “Movies Draft TV to Soft-Sell Fans,” New York Times, November 13, 1962, D13. 24 “MGM in Deal for NSS to Handle Its Trailers,” Daily Variety, June 5, 1957, 1. The National Screen had long dominated trailer production in Hollywood. “The NSS Story of Service,” Motion Picture Herald, March 14, 1959, 18–21. 25 Joseph Morella, “Young Trailer-Makers of Manhattan,” Variety, March 26, 1969, 35. 26 Stuart Byron, “MGM Changing Its Ad Setup,” Daily Variety, June 17, 1969, 1, 4.

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to be a hit or a bomb,” recounts Shapiro. “You had to try to get the president of the movie company to expand its marketing budget so that it would include material like featurettes.”27 The of a promotional featurette added greatly to the outlay of a marketing campaign, with featurette budgets ranging from $6,000 to $25,000 in 1960s dollars.28 The featurettes for an epic flm could easily surpass that amount. The proposed budget for a featurette on The Greatest Story Ever Told (, 1965) exceeded $40,000.29 Because of the bigger overall budgets of large-scale productions, studios tended to produce promotional featurettes for the industry’s higher-profle flms rather than for smaller, middle-budget motion pictures. This promotional tactic would have an impact on the image of Hollywood, which tended to spotlight production activities that were ambitious and often global. With the fnancial investment in a promotional campaign rising, and with so much depending on the success of an individual flm, movie companies favored one-of ad campaigns tailored to each production. For this kind of work, Hollywood studios turned to smaller advertising shops with more customized procedures. Beginning in the mid- to late 1960s, New York–based boutique agencies, known in the industry as “vendors,” ofered full services, including print ads, copywriting, trailers, and media spots. Studios could count on these integrated one-stop shops for all their marketing needs, as opposed to working in a piecemeal by resorting to individual companies to handle distinct aspects of promotions. Vendors such as Kaleidoscope, Cinemedia, Rosebud Advertising, and Floyd L. Peterson Inc. featured young “creatives” who were part of the “creative revolution” in advertising that galvanized the other, smaller consumer ad agencies behind unconventional campaigns for alcohol, , and commercial .30 Studios hired these flm-oriented boutique agencies to fashion novel campaigns, and featurettes were frequently part of the package.31 The agencies, which were in the business of manufacturing concepts that could market entertainment, assembled featurettes to sell the distinctive characteristics of each flm. At the same time, they also advanced a vision of Hollywood that found value in the production process. One of the principal creatives at the time was Merv Bloch, who started out in ’ advertising department. During the mid-1960s, he went on to do ad work at United Artists and the William H. Schneider agency when innovative campaigns for Beatles movies and the franchise were reinvigorating movie advertising. In 1968, Bloch formed the boutique agency Rosebud to provide movie companies a range of services, including promotional featurettes. Bloch suggests that

27 Mike Shapiro, interview with author, June 11, 2015. 28 “Promotional Featurettes for TV (5 to 30 Mins., Up to $25,000) Enjoy Spreading Acceptance,” Variety, December 11, 1963, 5. 29 Eric Stacey to Maxwell Hamilton, December 6, 1962, Greatest Story Ever Told (Frank Davis, Documentary), George Stevens Papers, Margaret Herrick Library. 30 Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes, 298–313; Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Coun- terculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 97–100; and David Cracknell, The Real Mad Men (London: Quercus, 2011). 31 Stuart Byron, “Unsung Film-Ad Copy Experts,” Variety, June 26, 1968, 5, 20; and “‘Featurette’ Sells Feature,” Variety, May 21, 1969, 7, 30.

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studios outsourced their promotional work to boutique agencies because these smaller shops “had the pulse of the youth market,” whereas the larger, establishment ad agencies fell back on old-fashioned hard-sell methods.32 Considering that a traditional agency like Young & Rubicam designed modern movie ad campaigns in the late 1960s, such partisanship may have refected the cultural and generational divisions of the times. Another boutique promoter was Chuck Workman, who is best known today for his movie-clip montages, including the Oscar-winning short Precious Images (1986). Back in the 1960s, he began his promotions career by editing featurettes for the vendor Floyd L. Peterson, which produced radio spots for motion pictures before branching out to trailers, TV ads, and featurettes. Eventually, Workman formed Calliope Films Inc. and took over Floyd L. Peterson’s featurette services for studios.33 Workman explains that many of the vendors consisted of aspiring flmmakers who wanted to transform promotional featurettes into high-quality behind-the-scenes flms.34 In fact, several boutique agencies undertook feature flmmaking themselves. But rather than producing the kinds of high-budget feature flms they promoted for Hollywood studios, vendors focused on low-budget, edgier fare. Floyd L. Peterson supplied production support services on the Madison Ave. satire Putney Swope (Robert Downey, 1969), and Merv Bloch produced the X-rated comedy The Telephone Book (Nelson Lyon, 1971).35 For these ambitious vendors, featurettes proved a valuable training ground for feature flmmaking. Once a studio decided to pursue developing a featurette for a flm, its promotions department would subcontract an outside vendor like Rosebud or Calliope Films, which ordinarily submitted a script for approval. The script was in fact just a loose blueprint; ultimately, the material that ended up in the fnal promo was contingent on the footage shot during the production of the feature flm. When the studio approved the provisional script, the vendor deployed a freelance crew normally made up of a director, a cameraperson, a sound recordist, and an assistant, who all visited the flm set for three to fve days.36 The featurette crews operated in a nimble manner thanks to new technological , including lighter 16mm cameras, faster flm stock, zoom lenses, and more portable sound equipment. These innovations, which advanced a new visual practice of promoting Hollywood flms, were simultaneously sparking a more observational trend in documentary that was exemplifed by direct cinema. Unlike direct cinema’s goal to objectively capture reality, though, promotional featurettes manipulated reality in overt ways. After the footage was shot, vendor editors, like Chuck Workman, structured the featurette through voice-over narration

32 Merv Bloch, interview with author, May 8, 2013. 33 “Peterson Air Spottery Sold to Two Employees; He’s for Features,” Variety, July 23, 1969, 3. 34 Chuck Workman, interview with author, June 1, 2015. 35 “Peterson Air Spottery Sold to Two Employees,” 3; and “Larry Applebaum of Cine Media Prepares for Own Feature Pic,” Variety, November 27, 1968, 18. 36 Ideally, the cinematographer of a featurette had to be a union member to shoot on a Hollywood set. The promo- tional film for The Ballad of Cable Hogue ran into problems with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees because the promo’s creators were two nonunion students from the . See The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Documentary 1969–1970), Papers, Margaret Herrick Library.

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and intercut the behind-the-scenes material with sequences from the production or the source flm’s rough cut.37 The resulting featurettes played a pivotal part in a new marketing that made production itself a dramatic attraction while demonstrating the studios’ mounting reliance on the more personalized approaches of vendors. To share this work with the public, Hollywood studios had to fnd new venues to sell motion pictures beyond print publications and movie theaters.

Broadcasting Production Work. The most prized venue for promotional featurettes was television, which could reach millions of viewers during prime-time hours, far surpassing the potential of a theatrical audience. While Hollywood studios formulated a number of tactics, like new flm technologies, to compete with television, they also took advantage of the medium from early on through a mixture of TV programming, production, and attempts at . Studios initially wanted to advertise theatrical features on television, but struggles over rights and residuals with various Hollywood and unions often complicated this goal. When some of these issues were resolved in the early 1960s, studios could more freely promote their flms on TV and more easily sell them for broadcast.38 Showing featurettes on television was part of how the flm industry continued to harness the emerging medium for promotional ends, and it was a sign of the strengthening convergence of cinema and TV. Even before the broadcast of promotional featurettes, Hollywood studios had already capitalized on TV to bring audiences’ insights into the production of theatrical flms. In 1954, recognized the utility of television with his ABC program Disneyland (1954–1958) by devising a successful formula of old cartoon shorts, original TV productions, previews of the soon-to-open theme park, and behind-the- scenes footage of Disney productions.39 By turning TV into a site of and entertainment where Walt Disney could explain how flms were made, he discovered a productive means to promote his theatrical flms and company brand (see Figure 2). Christopher Anderson claims that “Disney defned television as a companion medium to the cinema, an informational medium that could be used to reveal the process of flmmaking—since that impulse could not be indulged in the movies themselves.”40 The popularity of Disneyland soon inspired other Hollywood studios to create their own TV programs. Warner Bros. Presents (ABC, 1955–1956), MGM Parade (ABC, 1955– 1956), and The 20th Century-Fox Hour (CBS, 1955–1957) all featured behind-the-scenes material. These shows arose during what Denise Mann describes as a shift in postwar promotions, when studios no longer counted on the publicity generated by fan magazines and gossip columnists. These studios increasingly depended on TV entertainers, who imparted “insider references” that helped the public gain insight into the operations

37 Bloch, interview, May 8, 2013; Workman, interview, June 1, 2015. 38 Jennifer Porst, “Disruptive Convergence: The Struggle over the Licensing and Sale of Hollywood’s Feature Films to Television before 1955” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2014); Janet Wasko, “Hollywood and Television in the 1950s: The Roots of Diversification,” in Lev, Fifties, 138–139. 39 “Disney to Trailerize Pix on ABC-TV Shows,” Daily Variety, April 2, 1954, 1, 10. 40 Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 145.

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of the flm industries.41 In treating television as a medium for showing how flms are made, Disney and the various studio programs helped lay the groundwork for promotional featurettes. As an indication of the intensifying use of marketing flms on TV in the mid-1950s, Holly- wood studios moved into producing featurettes for broadcast. One of the Figure 2. Walt Disney explains the process with a diagram of most active companies the multiplane camera in an office set from Disneyland’s “Tricks of Our Trade” (ABC, February 13, 1957). was United Artists, which began putting together television promos that included background information on the making of the company’s theatrical releases.42 In 1956, the company conducted a survey of television stations and learned of their interest in allowing flm companies to promote theatrical products on TV. Accordingly, it planned an ambitious output of seventy-fve featurettes to air.43 The following year, a reportedly unprecedented 115 TV stations aired How a Great Film Is Made (1957).44 This featurette publicized United Artists’ big-budget war flm The Pride and the Passion (, 1957) dur- ing NBC’s daytime program Home (1954–1957).45 Attempting to target the show’s fe- male audience, the featurette follows Margaret Clark, an American elementary school teacher who worked as the production’s bookkeeper while on sabbatical in . Clark narrates a series of staged scenes, which portray her flmmaking experience as both an educational tour of Toledo and a romantic adventure with the flm’s Spanish assistant casting director. Into the 1960s, United Artists expanded its featurette work by creating longer TV specials for high-profle flms such as the – comedy The to Hong Kong (Norman Panama, 1962), the Rat Pack western Sergeants 3 ( John Sturges, 1962), and the international coproduction Five Miles to Midnight (, 1963).

41 Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 25–26. 42 “Sullivan to Scan Work,” New York Times, January 11, 1956, 63; “No Sluff Times, Other Targets,” Daily Variety, January 18, 1956, 7. 43 “UA to Boost TV-Selling Of Pix,” Daily Variety, December 4, 1956, 1, 17. 44 Featurette titles and for directors and production companies tend to be inconsistent and sometimes un- known. In some cases, featurettes I viewed did not include a director’s . In other cases, only the film company or vendor that produced the featurette was credited. Whenever possible, I include this information after the featurette title. The year of the featurette typically corresponds to the release of the source film that is being promoted. 45 “115 Telestations to Carry 30-Min. Plug for ‘Passion,’” Daily Variety, May 24, 1957, 2.

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In addition, United Artists assembled a half-hour program called Berlin Today (aired in 1962), which promoted Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) with behind- the-scenes footage, along with a report on the crisis in Berlin that led to the city’s partition. Because of the topical nature of Kramer’s flm, the company also produced ninety-second spots of the flm’s at work and at play to air between TV news broadcasts.46 In time, United Artists branched out beyond its own advertising and publicity departments because of television’s appetite for promotional material. It relied on outside vendors while setting up an in-house audio-video department to supply TV news programs with featurettes that promoted upcoming releases.47 Even as television provided the primary home for featurettes, Hollywood studios also capitalized on nontheatrical spaces and more traditional movie theaters to exhibit the making-of flms for a diversity of audience groups. Fox example, Rome in Madrid (Globe Video, 1964), a featurette made for The Fall of the Roman Empire, was distributed to such as schools, women’s clubs, local TV stations, groups, and the press.48 A featurette could also exploit its source flm’s subject matter to appeal to a particular audience. Because of the biblical theme of The Greatest Story Ever Told, a promotional short for the flm screened for church leaders in addition to TV and theatrical audiences.49 To market the flm Strangers When We Meet (Richard Quine, 1960), which is partly about the of a building, a featurette played at various home and garden expositions around the United States. The promo plugged both the Columbia picture and Weyerhaeuser to wood dealers, contractors, and the buying public.50 Doubling as both a movie and a lumber advertisement, the featurette demonstrated the far-reaching ways a flm company could publicize its releases. While not a widespread phenomenon, movie theaters showed some promotional featurettes. Certain exhibitors were eager to project shorts before a feature flm, since studios had cut back on producing , animated cartoons, and serials. A cross between a short subject and a trailer, featurettes helped movie theaters fll out a feature program, often free of charge. Sometimes the theatrical featurette would give audiences a privileged peek into the making of the flm they were about to see, closely linking the production process and fnal movie product. Before the projection of Saint Joan (, 1957) in movie theaters, a series of shorts revealed the flm’s various stages of production.51 More often, these featurettes functioned like a trailer, appearing in theaters prior to a flm’s release to attract public interest. In the weeks before the opening of ( , 1964), 250 prints of the featurette On the Trail of the Iguana (Ross Lowell, 1964) circulated in US and foreign

46 “UA Looking to TV as Happy Medium for Film Plugs via Documentaries,” Variety, February 21, 1962, 18. 47 “United Artists Creates TV-AM Dept. to Attain Maximum Air Sell Stress,” Variety, July 19, 1967, 14. 48 “Par’s ‘Rome in Madrid’ Plug for Bronston Pic,” Variety, February 19, 1964, 19. 49 Ann del Valle, report, September 5, 1963, Greatest Story Ever Told (Frank Davis, Documentary), George Stevens Papers, Margaret Herrick Library. 50 Various correspondence, 1959 and 1960, Strangers When We Meet (Featurette), Weiser Papers, Margaret Herrick Library. 51 Peter Musgrave, “Making a Movie of Movie-Making,” American Cinematographer, September 1957, 596.

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cinemas.52 Tomorrow the Moon (1964), a featurette for ’ First Men in the Moon (, 1964), played in more than six hundred US theaters leading up to the flm’s Thanksgiving holiday release.53 With a greater potential audience, though, television remained the principal medium for delivering promotional featurettes. Film companies eventually realized that television networks liked to show featurettes as supplements to the prime-time broadcast of Hollywood movies because they provided a way to fll TV schedules with inexpensive programming. However, studios could not always place their featurettes in coveted prime-time slots and instead looked to the daytime programming of local stations where the air needed flling.54 Nonnetwork channels also programmed featurettes that were included in the purchase of syndicated flm packages. The amplifying intersection of featurettes and television prompted Variety to comment: “The tv featurette is the newest wrinkle in this coexistence scheme and it is something that is taking on increasing importance all the time.”55 This symbiotic relationship was signifcant because promotional featurettes helped convert television into a space where the viewing public could gain insights into flmmaking culture. During the mid-1960s, featurettes attained their most high-profle position on TV when networks began to regularly telecast featurettes after feature flms. On programs such as NBC Saturday Night at the Movies (1961–1978) and The ABC Sunday Night Movie (1964–1998), which had become robust ancillary venues for theatrical flms, the sched- uled slot lasted from two to two-and-a-half hours on average. When a feature flm ran short, the network often flled the remaining period with a featurette. Both entities benefted: the network received programming that could occupy broadcast time, and the studio earned unpaid publicity for its flms during prime-time hours. In addition, studios could target a TV audience who, research proved, were more likely to attend the —a refection of flm promotion’s evolution from focusing on mass appeal to more specialized audience segments.56 As feature flms began to make up at least two hours of prime-time every night by the late 1960s, the demand for programming fller continued to spur the production of promotional featurettes.57 During this period of growth, the strictures of broadcast TV would have a pivotal ef- fect on the content of the promos and how production work would be depicted. The promotional featurette existed in a nebulous realm in the televisual landscape, serving as a mix of documentary and advertisement. Because of this ambiguity, boutique agencies in collaboration with Hollywood studios had to steer clear of turning out a short that resembled a hard-sell advertisement, as the featurettes needed to be free TV programming and not a paid ad. Within TV’s “magazine” programming format that had taken hold in the late 1950s, the featurette had to ft neatly into

52 “13-Mins. Color Short Ballys Mono ‘Iguana,’” Variety, June 24, 1964, 11. 53 “Film Plugs & Pluggers,” Variety, November 11, 1964, 14. 54 “Promotional Featurettes for TV,” 5. 55 “Promotional Featurettes for TV,” 5. 56 William Lafferty, “Feature Films on Prime-Time Television,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 244. 57 Lafferty, “Feature Films on Prime-Time Television,” 246.

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the network-controlled programming slot rather than the commercial breaks that advertisers bought into.58 United Artists encountered a problem with this divide between programming and advertising when its featurette for The Alamo ( , 1960) received bad press from TV critics for coming of like an overlong trailer.59 To avoid criticism or rejection from a television broadcast, featurettes had to eschew the hard-sell line of traditional advertising campaigns and instead soft-sell the theatrical flm by revealing the production phase. Ronald Saland, who was instrumental in producing dozens of featurettes and placing them on TV through his company, Professional Films, remembers how a network’s guidelines shaped the structure and content of the promos. At times, featurettes were recut to meet the dictates of the network. “Almost everything we did would be tailored to the network,” he explains. “In order to get on the network, [featurettes] couldn’t be outright promotion in their eyes. We’d have to go through their programs and practices. And so we had to have some kind of a hook.”60 Serving as a solution to TV’s advertising restrictions, this hook took the form of conventional making-of themes that helped visualize flmmaking. Illustrating production to get a featurette on TV became a subterfuge that would infuence the development of the making-of form for years to come.

Visualizing Production Work. As featurettes became a valuable component of promoting flms, movie studios and boutique advertising agencies faced the task of how to show Hollywood flmmaking in light of the changes to postwar productions. During this period, production operations continued to decentralize as studios sold of their back lots and extended the trend of location shooting both in the United States and abroad. Promotional featurettes brought these issues into public view by recording the spectacle of foreign location shooting. By spotlighting global, of-the- lot flmmaking, featurettes helped perpetuate location work and promote a shifting picture of Hollywood production during a time of industrial instability. As Janet Staiger explains, “What advertising stressed became grounds for competition and a large part of the set of standards for flm practice.”61 As a paratext that generated meaning beyond the flm it sought to sell, this form of promotion rendered Hollywood production work in ways that were at once compelling and contrived through much of the 1960s. What gets left out of featurettes’ portraits of movie shoots, as I will demonstrate, can reveal both the myths and the realities of production activities. To better understand the evolution of the depiction of Hollywood flmmaking, I want to frst explore how production had been characterized through moving image before the 1960s. While promotional featurettes gave a wide television audience insight into how movies were crafted, flming the production enterprise for marketing purposes was not novel in Hollywood. In the decades before the spread of promotional featurettes, the

58 William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 155–164. 59 “UA Looking to TV as Happy Medium,” 18. 60 Ronald Saland, interview with author, July 8, 2015. 61 Staiger, “Hollywood Mode of Production,” 97.

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representation of production was hardly realistic. In flmed studio tours that movie companies periodically made to strengthen their brand for exhibitors and the public, many flmmaking scenes were staged for the camera (see Figure 3). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Motion Pic- ture Association of America, in cooperation with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci- ences, sought to ofset the eco- nomic unease within Hollywood with a campaign called Movies and You, which involved a series of documen- taries about the industry.62 The short flms, which shed light on diferent positions, mixed

invented and vérité scenes of the Figure 3. A visual tour of the Fox lot (20th Century-Fox, 1936) production process to tout the gives viewers a glimpse of the studio’s process department movie business to the public.63 specialists in a staged shot. These instances of manipulated reality were also found in behind-the-scenes produc- tions that featured hosts describing the making of a movie from a studio set and then introducing clips for a flm. Walt Disney established the standard with his Disneyland program by explaining live-action and animated flm productions from an ofce set. In what Jennifer Gillan calls a “brand platform,” these episodes aimed to reveal the creative work that went into each theatrical production as much as to promote a folksy visionary image of Disney and his studio.64 Promotional flms that previewed future releases for sales departments and exhibitors used a fabricated approach to representing production work as well. In many of these flmed presentations, studio executives and flmmakers announced upcoming movies from ofces and soundstages to give the suggestion of a production space. MGM pro- duced The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Story (1951), an extended sales flm for exhibitors that incorporated preview clips introduced by production from an ofce. Because of the flm’s success, the studio decided to it to a general audience and release it theatrically and to produce separate theatrical trailers that featured stars pre- senting the coming attractions.65 Several years later, MGM’s exhibitor flm 1955 Motion Picture Theater Celebration interspersed scenes of new flms with brief shots of the Culver City back lot and crews on soundstages. Other studios put together sales flms that continued to use simulated episodes of flmmaking. In 1957, 20th Century-Fox released The Big Show, an ambitious, nearly two-hour feature flmed in DeLuxe color and its own

62 “‘Movies and You’ Skillful Job of Public Relations,” Hollywood Reporter, January 11, 1949, 4. 63 Thank you to Jennifer Porst for sharing her knowledge of the Movies and You shorts and PR campaign. 64 Jennifer Gillan, Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid (New York: Routledge, 2015), 206–211. 65 “‘MGM Story’ Big Hit at Houston Conclave,” Daily Variety, November 1, 1950, 1, 15; “‘MGM Story’ Getting Fresh Format for General Release,” Daily Variety, November 7, 1950, 5; and “‘MGM Story’ Success Prompts Studio to Plan Sequels,” Daily Variety, February 27, 1951, 4.

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system, CinemaScope. Eventually, Fox released a shorter, edited version for the general public, signaling a growing attempt to sell flms to audiences through be- hind-the-scenes insights.66 The Big Show proceeds down the studio hierarchy, presenting Fox personnel speaking to the camera, mostly from traditional spaces of production. From his ofce, President Spyros Skouras discusses his company’s plan to make ffty-fve flms in 1957. Next, production head Buddy Adler praises the studio’s operation over aerial shots of the Fox lot. Then the flm moves on to an array of producers and direc- tors who introduce clips of forthcoming movies from ofces and soundstages. These scenes of flmmaking, which are associated with studio-bound production work, stand in contrast to a few segments that point to a more global outlook. With his newly inde- pendent producer status, Darryl F. Zanuck speaks from an ofce set in London about Fox’s slate of international productions, including The Sun Also Rises (, 1957) and Island in the Sun (, 1957). The flm then switches to producer David O. Selznick, who describes his production of A Farewell to Arms (, 1957) from the flm’s location in the Italian Alps (see Figure 4). While these dispatches from abroad still had the artifcial look of earlier promotional flms, they indicate that studios like Fox were mounting motion pictures that were bigger and more international as a strategy to help negotiate the industrial changes in the postwar era.

Figure 4. David O. Selznick speaks from the set of A Farewell to Arms (20th Century-Fox, 1957) on location in the Italian Alps in the promotional film The Big Show (20th Century-Fox, 1957). With the growing need to soft-sell the production process on television in order not to violate a network’s restrictions on programming that appeared as an advertise- ment, promotional featurettes opted for a diferent plan. They attempted to narrativize flmmaking by veering away from staged scenes of conventional production spaces toward documentary footage of casts and crews at work on location. By focusing on the mechanics of production, these featurettes utilized an “operational aesthetic,” a concept that historian Neil Harris uses to describe the revelations of showman P. T. Barnum’s hoaxes. The operational aesthetic made the desire to understand the hoax just as absorbing as the display of it.67 Similarly, in featurettes the operational aesthetic

66 “Theatres Get 20th ‘Big Show,’” Daily Variety, June 27, 1957, 1, 2. 67 Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), chap. 3. Both Chris- topher Anderson and Steven Watts borrow the operational aesthetic concept from Harris to describe Walt Disney’s

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reveals the creation of flms to trigger the audience’s pleasure in understanding flm- making procedures. The allure of making-of flms lies in unveiling not just the trickery that went into producing what’s on the screen but also the work of designing striking visuals, shooting in far-fung locales, and creating a more heightened sense of spectacle and realism. Above all, the featurettes’ operational aesthetic portrayed the craft that went into fashioning a flm’s high production values. The featurette Moscow in Madrid (Thomas Craven Film Corporation, 1965) stresses a production dilemma in the making of Doctor Zhivago (, 1965): how to re-create outside of the ? The voice-over narration proclaims that “Moscow has risen anew on the Spanish plains,” while we see footage of Zhivago’s crew constructing intricate and landscapes that replicate Moscow on locations throughout Spain. To promote Around the World under the Sea (, 1966), a featurette presents another challenge: shooting complicated underwater sequences in the Bahamas and ’s Great Barrier Reef. As the crew drops cameras and lighting equipment down to the ocean foor, the narration explains, “New techniques in making such a flm as Around the World under the Sea require a totally new concept in support equipment and movie props.” Subsequently, the short presents an of real underwater gear: a two- person submarine, a scuba sphere, and a diving suit. Both of these featurettes draw on hyperbolic voice-overs and sequences of technical know-how to express the ingenuity of manufacturing flmic spectacle. As these featurettes illustrate, authentic foreign locales became production elements that brought visual interest to the flms being sold. Owing to their documentary impulse, 1960s featurettes were particularly efective at conveying the semblance of realism that resulted from location shooting. The authenticity of place in MGM’s French-Mexican-American coproduction Guns for San Sebastian (Henri Verneuil, 1968) comes to the fore in the featurette San Sebastian 1746 in 1968 (Floyd L. Peterson, 1968), which emphasizes the eponymous Mexican . The location remains “exactly as it was two centuries ago,” the narration informs us. Likewise, to promote The Sand Pebbles (Robert Wise, 1966), the featurette A Ship Called San Pablo (Theodore Taylor, 1966) singles out various locales in Hong Kong and Taiwan. However, because many of the locations stood in for mainland , the featurette markets the source flm by emphasizing verisimilitude rather than authenticity (see Figure 5). While the promo accentuated foreign settings to generate attention, ultimately the artistry of Hollywood flmmakers refashioning one location for another trumped true authenticity. Even if realism was a major justifcation for shooting flms abroad, hyping the illusion of authenticity—a component of an operational aesthetic—was just as persuasive in promotional campaigns. Some featurettes also address the technical and logistical hurdles of working on location, a theme that corresponds to an operational aesthetic’s emphasis on process. A behind-the-scenes look at King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961) depicts the flming of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. The promo details the Super Technirama crew’s

explanation of the filmmaking process. See Anderson, Hollywood TV, 145; and Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Columbia: University of Press, 2001), 366.

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difcult camera setup, the coordination of thousands of Spanish extras, and the construction of production facilities in the hills outside of Madrid. In sum, the making of a biblical epic becomes a triumph of or- ganization. For The Guns of Navarone ( J. Lee Thompson, 1961), Columbia Pictures produced a series of fea- turettes that followed star

Figure 5. The promotional featurette A Ship Called San Pablo (A James Darren’s Greek hon- China Seas Film, 1966) shows how the location unit for The Sand eymoon in one version and Pebbles (20th Century-Fox, 1966) re-created in the the shopping spree of actors streets of Taipei. Irene Papas and Gia Scala in another. Both variants play like visual tours of the island of Rhodes, where the flm was shot. These shorts juxtapose these passages of leisure with views of the risky camera positions the location shoot required. Over shots of the camera crew setting up on precipitous sea clifs, a voice-over narrates: “A studio would be safer, but only such rugged landscapes as these could capture the searing drama and high adventure of a lastingly great flm.” The rhetoric of ballyhoo aside, the footage refected changes in Hollywood production by progressing from static setups of hosts introducing movie clips—a lingering impression of the studio mode of production—to on-set shots of flm units operating all around the world. Through celebrations of a flm’s production values, foreign locations, and flm- making expertise, featurettes maintained a promotional campaign’s long-established tradition of realism and spectacle.68 Even as this tradition found a welcome home on television, Hollywood studios diferentiated theatrical releases from television program- ming by having featurettes indirectly underscore facets of movie technologies, such as widescreen aspect ratios, that TV could not yet deliver. From today’s vantage point, featurettes act as indispensable records for understanding 1960s Hollywood because of what they chronicled (e.g., increased of-the-lot flmmaking) and sold (e.g., the in- ternational character of flm production). However, featurettes were anything but vérité records of production activities, as many of them were conceptualized before shoot- ing commenced and then reshaped in postproduction. Extant scripts and production correspondence for featurettes reveal that standardized production routines could be framed with the aid of voice-over narration to meet the objectives of a promotional campaign.69 This of production work often rested on a series of structur- ing motifs that solidifed some conventions of the making-of form that continue today.

68 Staiger, “Announcing Wares,” 6–7. 69 Promotional featurette scripts written by film publicist Jack Atlas for Columbia Pictures are collected in the Jack Atlas Papers, Margaret Herrick Library.

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Manufacturing the Metaphors and Myths of Production Work. One of the most enduring conventions of promotional featurettes is how the flm’s story becomes a metaphor for the production. Here, the shooting of an adventure flm is treated as a journey or the production of a war movie is regarded as a battle. This structuring method allowed the makers of featurettes to distill the complexities of a production into a pithy promo. The late Paul Arthur noted of the making-of form, “A recurring tactic is to seize on an integral trope for the flmmaking process that mirrors the ty- pology of the original narrative.”70 In a study of how Hollywood’s making-of docu- mentaries represent creative collaboration, Robert González identifes a similar use of metaphors that enable “a mapping of the fictional world of the film onto the real world of the .”71 By melding fction and reality, these metaphors furnish the flmmakers with a way to validate their labor and foster a sense community. I argue that through the synthesis of the fctional narrative and the behind-the-scenes narra- tive, the story-as-production metaphor becomes an essential device that promotional featurettes employed to market Hollywood’s flmmaking reputation in the 1960s and in the decades to come. The metaphors often drew on the actual shooting locations to associate where the flm was shot with where the story was set. In a series of featurettes made for Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), the Jordanian desert landscape performs as both a back- drop for a story about desert warfare and a site where the location unit confronted real-life sand storms and scorching heat. “From the outset, the desert gave no quarter,” announces the narrator of the promo In Search of Lawrence (Thomas Craven Film Cor- poration, 1962), as the crew members’ perseverance in the face of extreme conditions imbues the production with a sense of daring that echoes the source flm’s epic adven- ture (see Figure 6). Searchers for a Special City (Kaleidoscope Films, 1966), a featurette for the urban drama Mister Budd- wing (1966), fuses production and story by having director ’s location scout in resemble the story’s amnesiac protagonist, who searches for his identity while traversing the city. A Grand Prix (1966) promo titled Challenge of the Champions (Dan- iel Davis, 1966) shows how the location unit, led by director , stages a race sequence just before a real Figure 6. The promotional featurette In Search of Lawrence (Thomas Craven Film Corporation, 1962) highlights the extreme race in Monte Carlo to take ad- desert conditions that the Lawrence of Arabia (Columbia, 1962) vantage of genuine spectators. cast and crew faced in Jordan.

70 Paul Arthur, “(In)dispensable Cinema: Confessions of a ‘Making-of’ Addict,” Film Comment, July–August 2004, 41. 71 Robert M. González Jr., “The Drama of Collaborative Creativity: A Rhetorical Analysis of Hollywood Film Making-of Documentaries” (PhD diss., University of South Florida, 2008), 126.

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The featurette presents the flming of the fctional race like a race itself, with all the pressure of the actual Monaco Grand Prix. The story-as-production metaphors in these featurettes help sell the source flm’s story by narrativizing themes from the movie in the portrayal of flmmaking while simultaneously making the production work dramatic. The story-as-production metaphor persisted in the ensuing years, becoming a cus- tomary narrative component in featurettes and feature-length making-of documenta- ries. Women in the Movies (Elliot Geisinger, 1974) relates the creation of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (, 1974) by making the flm’s female-driven plot resonate with the contributions of the production’s female editor, art director, and producer, as well as their struggle to work in a male-dominated industry. In Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982), an account of the flming of Fitzcarraldo (1982), director Werner Herzog’s extravagant ambitions dovetail with the character Fitzcarraldo’s dreams, as both individuals pursue the same Sisyphean task of hauling a ship over a mountain. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, 1991) depicts the arduous production of (1979) as war, or as director declared at a press conference that opens the documentary, the War itself. Hearts of Darkness actually goes further and organizes much of its making-of narrative around the blending of story and production: flmmaking is presented like a jungle trek, the mad genius of Coppola is equated to Colonel Kurtz’s, and actors are confated with their characters. Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 2002) details another troubled flm shoot by chronicling the breakdown of Terry Gilliam’s incomplete production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Gilliam’s constant battles against uncontrollable forces become a manifestation of Quixote tilting at windmills. In all these documentaries, the story-as-production metaphor shapes the flm’s overall structure and the perception of modern flmmaking. Why have producers of promotional featurettes and making-of documentaries re- peatedly relied on this convention? First, the metaphors enable producers to apply a ready-made story formula to the form’s narrative. The story-as-production metaphor could come into play when the promo creators devised a rough concept to guide the featurette crew in how to record the behind-the-scenes footage. A featurette script for Lost Command (Mark Robson, 1966) takes inspiration from the flm’s story of a French ofcer’s campaigns in Vietnam and . The script likens direc- tor Mark Robson to a “chief of staf” who can handle “large scale battle action and great masses of men and equipment.”72 Alternatively, the story-as-production meta- phor could serve as a reliable structuring option during the editing phase, providing a simple solution to the perennial problem of a narrative out of a mass of foot- age. In the archival records for a promotional flm about Sam Peckinpah’s western The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), correspondence indicates that the flmmakers advocated for a means to edit what was initially a chaotic early cut of the featurette. One memo articulates, “We will sense that the goals of the actors and Sam are in many ways

72 Joe Ansen and Jack Atlas, “The Un-Split Second” Featurette No. 4, May 23, 1966, Lost Command (Script), Jack Atlas Papers, Margaret Herrick Library.

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identical to the goals of Hogue’s main characters.”73 This idea equates the flmmaking pursuits of Peckinpah and his cast with the movie characters’ entrepreneurial spirit in the Wild West. Whether at the preplanning or editing stage, story-as-production metaphors were convenient devices for easily fashioning a narrative in the featurette. Furthermore, to be broadcast on network TV, featurettes could not act as a barefaced flm advertisement. By merging story and production, a featurette producer could sell the flm’s plot by smuggling it into the depiction of its making. The story-as-production metaphor also helps marketers interpret the flmmaking profession—an intensely technical trade involving endless decisions—for the public. By appealing to notions people are more familiar with, such as racing and war, the producers of making-of materials can evoke images of the flmmaking profession that are as dramatic as the movies themselves. In the case of 1960s featurettes, these tropes were sometimes more interesting than the promoted theatrical flms. Describ- ing the soft-selling of featurettes, Chuck Workman recalls, “You were dealing with a lot of weak movies that were kind of formulaic, and you were just looking for things that could make them special.”74 Using a flm’s story to decode production work has also been more widespread. This reading of the flmmaking enterprise is one way that flm journalists, scholars, and the industry itself have treated the idea of movie- making. After all, some interpretations of movie stars are predicated on integrating a screen persona and the ’s public identity. Scholars have shown that publicity and advertising departments associated actors’ on-screen characters with their of-screen life so that audiences confated the two, not unlike how a flm’s story can be mapped onto its making.75 What aspects of flmmaking do these metaphors leave out, especially as a demonstration of the realities of production in the 1960s? By collapsing the production process and the flm’s story, the rhetoric of the making-of form tends to transform the collective activity of moviemaking into heroic tales of directors mobilizing their artistry to surmount all manner of logistical complications. John Caldwell suggests that this “industrial self-theorizing” often found in making-of documentaries is “reductive and proprietary.” Making-ofs simplify the learned skills of actual workers by invoking notions of magic to brand media companies as places of .76 Barbara Klinger also points out that behind-the-scenes material on perpetuates the long-standing discourse of “movie magic.” She writes, “Viewers do not get the unvarnished truth about the production; they are instead presented with the ‘promotable’ facts, behind-the-scenes information that supports and enhances a sense of the ‘movie magic’ associated with Hollywood production.”77 Far from accurate

73 “Notes on The Ballad of Cable Hogue documentary,” n.d., The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Documentary 1969–1970), Sam Peckinpah Papers, Margaret Herrick Library. 74 Workman, interview, June 1, 2015. 75 Cathy Klaprat, “The Star as Market Strategy: in Another Light,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 351–376; and Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004). 76 Caldwell, Production Culture, 21. 77 Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 2006), 73.

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records, then, promotional featurettes obscure the realities of production work by exploiting metaphors and the myth of movie magic in the form of simplifed, easy-to- sell making-of tales. Key to this reductive tendency is highlighting above-the-line personnel, namely the director, as the protagonists of flmmaking adventures. The representation of a chief creative individual allows featurettes to tell a cohesive narrative succinctly and to bring coherence to the production operation. In a memo regarding the messy state of the promotional flm for The Ballad of Cable Hogue, the producers recommend restructuring the promo by concentrating on director Sam Peckinpah. The memo explains that Peckinpah “will provide the needed illumination of transition and control of audience’s point of view.”78 Like the story-as-production metaphors, the foregrounding of an authorial position could begin at the conception of the featurette, too. A treatment outlining a promotional flm about The Greatest Story Ever Told proposes connecting various aspects of the production through the fgure of director George Stevens. The treatment describes, “All the elements of the production will be shown—the exhaustive research, the careful planning, the set designing, the technical equipment, location shooting, studio shooting, editing, scoring, etc.—but all of these are unifed through the personality of Mr. Stevens, and become meaningful as instruments of his idea.”79 The proposal takes an auteurist approach by reducing the , flmmaking practices, and labor into mere to facilitate the execution of Stevens’s vision. Although the focus on directors may have oversimplifed the production process, singling out directors raised awareness of the creators behind the camera for a wide television audience. Movie viewers at the time, according to Chuck Workman, “were interested in the meta world of flmmaking. They were interested in who the directors were.”80 This popular concern with directors refected the 1960s discourse on auteurism found in cinema journals, monographs, and flm schools. In celebrating directors, promotional featurettes relegated others, primarily below- the-line personnel, to the background. On occasion, though, a featurette might single out a certain below-the-line crew member. The Man Who Makes a Difference (1968), a promo made for (John Sturges, 1968), celebrates second-unit photographer John Stephens and his daredevil work in race cars and on ski slopes. But overall, featurettes tended to obscure the economic and logistical demands of large productions by centering on directors and actors. This bias may be found earlier on Walt Disney’s TV programs, whose behind-the-scenes explorations, argues Christopher Anderson, obfuscated fnancial and labor issues in the show’s treatment of movie productions.81 Nevertheless, insights into the labor of flmmaking could be glimpsed through the veneer that Disney fabricated. “Escape to Paradise,” a Walt Disney Presents (ABC, 1958– 1961) segment promoting Swiss Family Robinson (Ken Annakin, 1960), ofers a more

78 “Notes on The Ballad of Cable Hogue documentary.” 79 Morton Heilig, “Theme and Production Outline for a 30-Minute 35mm Color Documentary about George Stevens’ Production of ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told,’” n.d., The Greatest Story Ever Told (Frank Davis, Documentary), George Stevens Papers, Margaret Herrick Library. 80 Workman, interview, June 1, 2015. 81 Anderson, Hollywood TV, 145.

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complicated depiction of labor than we see in demonstrations of production work from earlier Disney TV shows. The episode features narration by the locals of Tobago, where the flm was shot. In the form of a calypso song, the commentary accompanies scenes of Tobagonians hauling flmmaking equipment. Even if the song tries to express the perspective of the local labor force, the calypso narration is ironically at odds with visuals that expose the hardships of production. The upbeat narration celebrates the joys of working on Swiss Family Robinson, but the camera reveals a violent tropical storm and the local workers up the ruined location. Such ironic contrasts are typical of the making-of form, when the imagery inadvertently lays bare how promotional tactics can misrepresent the production experience. A less overt irony exists in the featurette promoting The Night of the Iguana. Portraying the location shoot in Mismaloya, , the promo consigns the local Mexican labor- ers to the background while pushing an auteurist agenda by profling John Huston’s personality and directorial style. Nonetheless, the actors receive some attention, too. Actor ’s voice-over explains that each day she climbed up and down a hill to reach the set in Mismaloya, a chore that reduced her legs to “jelly.” To illustrate this point, the featurette creators present not Kerr ascending the hill but Mexican workers struggling to building materials to the remote location (see Figure 7). The shots were likely chosen to embody the hardship that Kerr recounts, but her description is not commensu- rate with the actual physical labor of the set builders we witness onscreen. Consequently, the flm foregrounds what is latent in the featurette, namely that the production benefted from the cheap manual la- bor of the locals— Figure 7. On the Trail of the Iguana (Professional Film Services, 1964) juxtaposes an important rea- Deborah Kerr’s voice-over narration with images of Mexican set builders. son international productions like The Night of the Iguana and Swiss Family Robinson were shot outside of Hollywood. In contrast to the metaphors and myths that featurettes peddle, moments like these uncover the hidden beneft of promotional featurettes. Although cloaked in voice-over narrations and editing decisions that support market- ing objectives, some of the realities of moviemaking are on display. Featurettes can equip us with critical information to understand how the motion picture industry con- structed its own likeness for the public. Moreover, they help us witness the sometimes invisible labor of production, even when it is not the focal point of promoting flms.

Conclusion: Visualizing a Global Production Industry. As production decentral- ized and international flmmaking grew, Hollywood developed an identity that helped reshape the image of movie production. The promotional featurettes of the 1960s

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came up with one avenue for visualizing this identity. They departed from the classical studio-era portrait of flmmaking, when the flm industry had cultivated a self-image of what John Caldwell calls “a visionary and technically savvy artists colony” that was closely tied to the geography and symbolic power of Hollywood.82 This notion per- sisted into the 1950s on studio-backed TV shows such as Disneyland, which perpetuated an outmoded picture of the flm industry, as Christopher Anderson has argued. “By representing the studio as an active self-contained creative community bustling with activity,” he writes, “these scenes evoke impressions of studio-era Hollywood while masking the fact that historical conditions had rendered those very images obsolete.”83 By the postwar era, this conception of Hollywood was transforming, because studios and independent producers were shooting movies outside of Southern California and around the globe, a situation that promotional featurettes captured. More than a mechanism of studio brand marketing, featurettes often showcased independent pro- ductions in which Hollywood studios functioned more as fnanciers and distributors, a reality that was difcult to convey. To transmit a more striking view of production work, featurettes refashioned old formulas of spectacle and realism through the allure of new settings, technologies, and location shooting. However, this image of Hollywood production was simultaneously manufactured and rooted in documentary evidence. While promotional featurettes attempted to provide a candid look at the making of Hollywood flms, they also sustained myths about the industry, chiefy its magic and might, by narrativizing actual production work. In the past, Hollywood was seen as a centralized production community teeming with ingenuity. Now featurettes presented location units traversing the globe to overcome the most complex of logistical challenges. In the past, flmmakers fabricated illusions on Hollywood back lots. Now featurettes presented directors mobilizing masses of people and contending with the unruly forces of nature. Despite these vivid glimpses of Hollywood production, promotional featurettes were not always successful at boosting box-ofce numbers, and the industry sufered a recession during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even so, these promos helped refashion a changing understanding of Hollywood moviemaking that found a home on television, pointing to the convergence of the two mediums. This portrait of Hollywood would further evolve as the flm industry transformed into the more youthful that emerged in the late 1960s with flms such as Bonnie and Clyde (, 1967), (, 1967), and Easy Rider (, 1969), and then on into the 1970s blockbuster era. Even as featurettes continued to be made and shown on TV through the 1970s, they played a lesser role as flm budgets fuctuated and studios focused their promotional campaigns on the theatrical run of a flm rather than the prerelease period.84 Eventually the promotional featurette form morphed into behind-the-scenes clips used in electronic press kits that

82 Caldwell, Production Culture, 284. 83 Anderson, Hollywood TV, 144. 84 Balio, United Artists, 219–220. Chuck Workman recalls that he worked on his last promotional featurettes around 1980. Workman, interview, June 1, 2015. Similarly, Ronald Saland recollects that the production of featurettes petered out in the early . Saland, interview, July 8, 2015.

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the media could repurpose. Today, original promotional featurettes have been revived as post-feature-flm supplements on cable channels such as . While their current presence on recalls their role as programming fller on 1960s broadcast television, they now have a new paratextual purpose in displaying production work to cultivate a nostalgic appreciation of Hollywood’s past. The history of making-of flms calls attention to the importance of what Jonathan Gray calls “of-screen studies” in understanding how a text’s meaning is produced.85 In building meaning around the creation of movies, featurettes became paratexts that gave added value to theatrical flms and reformulated the signifcance of Hollywood production in an age of uncertainty. As I have argued in this article, featurettes operate, as both marketing material and visible evidence of the production process. Synthesizing these two concerns through a historical perspective reveals how the industry sold itself to the public via television and through the work of advertising and publicity departments and vendors. More than just disposable pieces of movie marketing, promotional featurettes tell us a great deal about Hollywood flmmaking during a time of industrial transition. Their infuence has endured, as featurettes also helped promote many of the making-of conventions that shape how we talk about production work today. ✽

Many thanks to the UCLA Film and Television Archive and its Archive Research and Study Center for support and access to their collection of behind-the-scenes flms and promotional featurettes.

85 Gray, Show Sold Separately, 4.

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